Community Living

          We’ve now finished up our first week of “normal” life on our new schedule. What does a typical day or a typical week incude, you might ask? The short answer is, we still aren’t sure! This week incuded hours of discussion with our future teammates about the practicalities of forming a team, and our convictions, methods, strengths, weaknesses, and hopes and dreams for our life together in Asia. Lots of prayer. Cooking for large groups of people. Working as a team on a project related to human trafficking. Working with a Creative World Justice group to brainstorm ways of addressing exploitation of workers on the cruise ships that frequently dock within a mile of our neighborhood. Babysitting the children in our community. Getting up early or staying up late to talk with prostituted women and people in addiction. Beginning to struggle through the Hindi alphabet and the unfamiliar sounds of vowels and consonants that our brains haven’t been trained to distinguish between. Enjoying a date night with a 40-minute walk to the closest Burmese restaurant 🙂  On top of all that, A. did some mechanic work and I found myself haphazardly swept into a protest march of several hundred people.
           There has been a lot of excitement and a lot of new experiences and great conversations over the past two weeks. However, after having lived in this community for a month we are also beginning to feel the strains and the uncomfortable realities of the communal life– things that we didn’t dwell on at length during our college years of dreaming about radical hospitality and intentional community. Sometimes it’s hard to find a quiet space or a place to be alone. But uppermost in my mind is the loss of control that we’ve experienced since moving here. Our community lives primarily on donated food. To demonstrate how wasteful the macrosystem of food production really is, we receive food from homeless shelters that have been given too much food to use– and of the donated food that we receive, a lot of the fruits and vegetables go bad before we’re able to use them (a lot of what we get is already expired).   Being at the bottom of the food chain for the first time, we have the chance to see just how much food is continually produced only to be thrown away each day… the food chain is a lot more inefficient than we thought.
          We’re very blessed to have access to so much free food, but in this new situation we usually eat whatever is on hand rather than choosing what we feel like eating or what we like. A. already has more of an eat-to-live mentality than I do, but I am coming to terms with how important food is to me– the ability to do my own grocery shopping, to choose what I eat and how to prepare it; to enjoy the food, and to eat healthily. Having my options limited and so many of my choices made for me is a source of stress. Part of the challenge set before me is to figure out what my limits are and to embrace those, but most of the challenge is to confront the deeper issues of my need for control. Having so little control over our schedule brings up the same feelings of stress.
          So, community life continues– we’re learning, and we’re experiencing the growing pains of adjusting to new rhythms and responsibilities.   It’s humbling to recognize our own flaws and limitations in the context of community, but we feel that we have been given a gift to be accepted into this family, and we look forward to the weeks ahead.

Source: New feed

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